dinosaur killing asteroid found?

Scientists believe a giant comet or asteroid that hit Earth about 65 million years ago was linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs, possibly by throwing up dust or chemical clouds that blocked the sun or by igniting global wildfires.

Calculations show the orbit of P/2010 A2 is related to the group of asteroids, known at the Flora family, that produced that asteroid.
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;)
 
arknor said:
i think the actual asteroid that whiped the dinosaurs out was probably turned into dust very fast
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The object probably has a crater below the sea somewhere but since the deepest sea beds out there have yet to be ventured it's not been found yet last I read.
 
Craters from impacts too small for extinction level events are still visible from orbit so that would be quite unlikely.
 
Interesting biology trivia time!

Rather than killing dinosaurs from impact of the meteor, dinosaurs may have died out due to biased sex ratios. Modern reptiles such as turtles and crocodiles can cause a litter of all male or all female offspring from eggs by incubating their eggs at certain temperatures (by only a few degrees centigrade).

If is hypothesised that the dust thrown into the atmosphere by the meteor could have changed the temperature of the earth's atmosphere considerably. Correspondingly, this might have meant that all offspring were subsequently all male and all female, causing the relatively 'insta-death' of a whole generation, particularly if dinosaurs were few and far between specially within a species.

Of cause, this does make us ask why the ancestral crocodiles and other reptiles managed to make it through, but it might be related to the abundance of food dinosaurs need to survive which might have been damaged by the meteor, or that these reptiles were at least partially aquatic.

Either way, it's amusing to imagine a massive t-rex sausage-fest :p
 
mrk said:
Craters from impacts too small for extinction level events are still visible from orbit so that would be quite unlikely.
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Give an example then

either way 65million years, Himalayas are 45million years old or so, so if it hit there, well it wouldnt exist
 
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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/impactcraters/

Ranging ages to approx 350 million years, 1.7billion years etc.

Of course it depends on location but a crater from an impact that wiped out surface life on the whole planet would certainly leave a scar somewhere - we just don't have the technology yet to map the entire crust of the planet with detail yet or look deep below the ice caps and sea.
 
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That story makes no sense to me but I assume it's attached to this article http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100202104608.htm

Essentially nothing to do with the dinosaurs, just the meteor may have originated from a similar location. Why is scientific news so rubbish in the mainstream press? :p

As for the meteor that possibly caused the extinction of the dinosaurs isn't it still widely believed that the crater in the Bay of Mexico was the one that may have done it, right age, shocked quarts (showing massive stress) and a lot of impact debris in the rock record.

As for the impact wiping out surface life on the whole planet, it didn't do that, in fact the KT extinction was one of the smaller mass extinctions with around 30% of fossilisable marine species becoming extinct and probably not many more surface species.

The depressing thing is the next mass extinction event is already occuring, humans are the cause... :(
 
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